Maximizing the Use of New Pressable Ingots

Without a doubt, laboratory owners and their technicians are challenged on a daily basis to improve productivity and maximize cost-effectiveness in order to be as profitable as possible. While it might seem that the increased demand for highly esthetic restorations would automatically lead to greater laboratory sales and profits, if you’re not making the most of your skills, time and materials, you and your employees might actually be working against yourselves.

What do I mean? Well, if you’re a laboratory fabricating all-ceramic restorations from pressed ceramics and let’s face it, many of us are these days because these materials (i.e., IPS Empress Esthetic) do provide us with outstanding esthetics and enhanced physical properties how do you (and did you realize you could) maximize your ingot usage? Well, you can. And, what’s more, you can use these new ingots, even with their increased translucency, when aggressive preparations result in the need for a greater thickness of ingot material.

At our laboratory, for example, we frequently use the new IPS Empress Esthetic (Ivoclar Vivadent) pressable ingots. When working on cases with this material, we perform a wax-up. However, we use special sprues that resemble little pinwheels. Then, once we’ve completed all the steps that need to be completed to press the case, we weigh the wax-up to determine the entire weight of our case. First we weigh the sprue former before the units are attached. After attaching the units, the ring to which all of the wax-ups are attached, is weighed again.  We subtract the weight of the sprue former from the total weight, and this provides us with the exact amount of ingot that will be required to press the units in ceramic.

What this process has done is allow us to calculate to the Nth degree how much a pressing will weigh so that we can translate that weight into how many ingots we’ll need. We know that one IPS Empress Esthetic ingot will press about .7 grams of wax. So, for every .7 grams of wax that we press, we’ll need one ingot.

So what, you ask? Well, based on this information, we’re maximizing the number of pressable units we can obtain from a single ingot. Now we’re getting three units from an ingot, when previously we’d only get two. It doesn’t sound like much, but the majority of cases in my laboratory are all-ceramic. If yours are too, consider this: Our savings translate to approximately $18 to $20 a day. In a month, that’s up to $400 that’s saved by maximizing the ingot pressings!

What’s more, that doesn’t even take into consideration the most expensive element of all labor. If the units fail as a result of insufficient ingot material, the case must be rewaxed. That in turn wastes technician time and laboratory money. This sometimes turns a profitable case into a money loser. 

Typically, we pay $11 an ingot. So, for two ingots, that’s $22. But, if I can get 6 units out of those two ingots, rather than just two units, that translates to a cost of only about $3 to $4 a unit. So, maximizing the use of our pressable ingots has definitely helped us maximize our profitability.

Think about this, too. When the new pressable ingots were first introduced earlier this year, doctors and laboratory technicians alike were grateful for their increased translucency compared to the original material’s composition. Almost automatically, everyone thought that more translucency is good and in many respects it is. However, letís not forget that the more translucent a material, the more likely it will be to pick up a gray tinge when placed in the mouth. That’s because the back of the mouth is dark, because there’s not a lot of light in that area.

So, this new translucent ingot could pick up the darkness of the oral environment, and that could translate into grayness, which is not desirable. As a result, you may have turned away from pressable ceramics for fear that they may have produced restorations that would be too translucent.

However, there is a solution. Let’s say a doctor sends you a case in which the teeth are aggressively prepared for whatever reason previous reduction, excessive tooth rotation, etc. What you, as the technician, are faced with is a case in which you’re going to have a lot of ingot and very little natural tooth structure underneath it. The result would be a very translucent effect with these new ingots, because now you have a really thick ingot, which only increases the amount of translucency.

The solution is to make them look like the original ingot material. How do you accomplish this? Well, at our laboratory, we developed our own technique in which we press the ingots in the pressing furnace, but instead of pressing them at 1075∞ C, we press them at 1045∞ C. This results in a look of the original IPS Empress material and is a great way to impart different variations of translucency just by altering the pressing temperature.

We all look for ways to make ourselves more productive and profitable. By applying our talents in new ways specifically in how we handle the materials we use on a daily basis owe can realize cost-savings that translate to increased profits. Maximizing the use of pressable ingots, as described here, is just one way to go about doing just that.